Unlike certificate revocation lists (CRLs), which are distributed periodically, contain information about all certificates that have been revoked or suspended, and can become quite large, an Online Responder responds to client requests for information about the status of individual certificates. The amount of data retrieved per request remains constant no matter how many revoked certificates there might be, which makes it easier to provide current status information to large numbers of clients when it might take an unacceptable amount of time for clients to download a CRL. Setting up multiple linked Online Responders in an Array can provide flexibility and scalability to revocation checking in diverse network environments.